Even the hardest heart - probably lodged inside some embittered book critic somewhere - would have been tempted to turn to fiction for a periodic escape from the cactoid reality of the horrific year 2020. In the US, shops were closed, schools were shuttered, streets were full of protests and riots, the economy was cratered, and open fascism was vocally supported by half the country - the various twists and turns of the made-up stories never looked so inviting. This won’t stay true, of course: 2021 will see the beginning of an avalanche of virus-novels and mask-novels and isolation-novels - we’ll be afflicted with COVID-fiction for far, far longer than we’re afflicted with COVID - but for now, we can rejoice in good fiction simply being good fiction, These were the best of them:

10 Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao by Jonathan Tel (Turtle Point Press)

We start off our list this year with something for which I ordinarily have little patience: the novel-in-stories, which has always struck me as some kind of wishy-washy Protestant compromise with the risks of writing an actual novel. But Tel’s multifaceted portrait of modern-day Beijing and its people is so dry and confident I was entirely won over.

9 The Boy in the Field by Margot Livesey (Harper)

Three young siblings find a stabbed boy in a field and wonder about the boy’s story - that’s the kernel of Margot Livesey’s quietly fascinating new novel. And yet, thanks to the intelligence and subtlety of this author’s narrative gifts, the story opens into a meditation on how the unexpected can ripple change outward in all directions.

8 St. Ivo by Joanna Hershon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

When Sarah, the fascinatingly flawed main character in Joanna Hershon’s new novel, accepts an invitation to a weekend country getaway with some estranged old friends, the book’s refreshingly intricate plotting deepens into a truly memorable and very interior story.

7 Small Days and Nights by Tishani Doshi (WW Norton)

This outwardly unassuming story about a woman who returns to India from America and discovers several unexpected new realities there is told with such beautiful narrative energy that it invests every plot-twist with unexpected freight, right down to the subtly powerful ending.

6 The American People Volume 2: The Brutality of Fact by Larry Kramer (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

As promised in its title, this conclusion to Larry Kramer’s “American People” series (and to his life; he died four months after the book appeared) is a brutal reading experience, a tour-de-force evocation of a bitter era, surely the saddest novel of the year - and one of the most beautiful, almost despite itself.

5 Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud (One World)

Every creative decision informing this remarkable novel, from the choice to invest its central haphazardly-constructed family with such awkward, winning dignity to the choice to tell a Trinidadian story in such Trinidadian tones and undertones, all of it is so precisely and movingly executed that the reader feels transported into a new world. 

4 Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stewart (Grove)

The natural suspicion attending a novel like Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain, about a gay boy and his alcoholic mother living in bleak 1980s Glasgow, would be that it’s more hype than heart, since it won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Award this year. But in this case, the heart preceded the hype; Stuart tells a hard and mesmerizing story in very beautiful language, and the combination creates a classic.

3 Jack by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Marilynne Robinson returns to the world of small-town Iowa for this deceptively simple story of the unfolding a relationship between two of her characters, but as always with this author, subtle miracles of insight and storytelling compassion are steadily developing just under the surface.

2 Florence Adler Swims Forever by Rachel Beanland (Simon & Schuster)

One summer tragedy in Atlantic City in 1934 sets in motion the unlikely but ultimately devastating currents of this fantastic book’s plots. Debut novels seldom make their way onto this particular list, but this books is as sad and assured as if the author had written a hundred before it.

1 Actress by Anne Enright (WW Norton)

The brittle relationship between a woman and her actress mother forms the world and backdrop for Anne Enright’s latest book, the best novel of 2020, in which a very specific and very twisted mother-daughter dynamic is so wonderfully written and so thoroughly understood that it comes to feel something like universal in its hard-won insights into the nature of love.